Limmex ironmongers shop dominated the corner of High Street and Wood Street, in Old Town, for more than 100 years.

It was established by Samuel Joseph Limmex in the early 1870s, But the Limmex family were not always quite so settled.

Samuel’s father, William, entered the Methodist ministry in 1836 and shortly after his marriage to Eleanor Handy in 1840 the couple set sail for the West Indies.

There William worked alongside Devon-born Wesleyan clergyman James Bickford as a Methodist missionary on the windward island of St Vincent.

It was here that their son Samuel Joseph was born in 1842.

By 1861 the family had returned to England and 19-year-old Samuel was working as an assistant at an ironmonger’s shop in Great Yarmouth.

Meanwhile, William and Eleanor continued to lead the peripatetic life demanded of a Methodist minister.

In 1861 William appears on the census as a visitor at the home of William and Charlotte Wigg in Barnby, Suffolk, and by 1870 he was preaching on the Allendale Town Circuit, Northumberland, travelling across the Scottish borders.

But by 1881 William had retired and he and Eleanor were living next door to their son and his family at 15 Prospect, Swindon.

Samuel, meanwhile, had been on his own travels.

He worked for a time in Brighton where he met and married young widow Rebecca Bartrop.

The couple lived at 9 Montpelier Road, Brighton, with Rebecca’s three children by her first marriage and their own child, Frederick William, before moving to Swindon in about 1873.

The business in Wood Street thrived and, in 1884, Samuel applied for an extension to the shop and for alterations to his house the following year.

The everyday tools and equipment Samuel sold have since become collectors’ items.

The average price for a cast-iron garden roller with the Limmex imprint is £60 and recently a set of wood working hand planes appeared on an online auction website.

Today the Limmex family memorial occupies a prominent site in the historic Radnor Street Cemetery. Buried there are William, who died in 1889 and Eleanor, who died in 1896. Rebecca died in 1901 and lies alongside her six-year-old son Harry Vaughan Limmex, who died in 1881, and her only grandson, Edward William who died in 1910 aged just four years and seven months.

Samuel Joseph died in 1935 and the last person buried in this extensive family plot was the couple’s daughter, Edith Ellen.

The business on the corner of Wood Street continued under the management of Samuel’s son Frederick William, who lived with his wife and three daughters, Eleanor, Edith and Kathleen, at 7 Croft Road.

The iconic shop on the corner of Wood Street eventually closed in 2000.